November 7, 1861, was a momentous day in the history of emancipation during the American Civil War. On that day, a combined Union naval and army amphibious force captured Port Royal, South Carolina. Roughly halfway between Charleston, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia, Port Royal Sound was one of the best natural anchorages on the Atlantic coast of the United States. It was an ideal location for the U.S. Navy to establish a base so it could tighten its blockade against the Confederacy.

What was new about Port Royal compared to other areas of the South occupied by Union forces was its exceptionally high concentration of slaves. Port Royal was part of the Sea Islands region of South Carolina and Georgia, an area dominated by large cotton and rice plantations. African Americans greatly outnumbered whites in the Sea Islands, so much so that many slaves in the Sea Islands spoke Gullah, a highly Africanized English dialect that was largely unintelligible to standard English speakers.

Union military leaders were aware of the nature of the Sea Islands and their initial plan for dealing with slavery there was to reassure the region’s white population that they did not intend to free their slaves. So Secretary of War Simon Cameron ordered the commander of the army portion of the expeditionary force, Gen. Thomas W. Sherman, to follow strictly the policies formulated during Benjamin Butler’s tenure at Fortress Monroe. Which meant seizing slaves as needed to serve the labor needs of Union forces, but keeping scrupulous work records so that loyal owners could later be compensated and their human property restored to them. Cameron’s letter to Sherman read:

Cameron’s orders, however, assumed the white population in the vicinity of Port Royal would be around during the Union occupation. The initial landing party from the invasion fleet found something quite different when they entered Beaufort, the only town in the Port Royal area. Naval Lieutenant J. Glendy Sprotson reported to his superior from Beaufort on November 8.

So when Confederate forces retreated in the face of the northern assault, virtually all of the white inhabitants fled with them. They evidently did not trust that the northern soldiers would protect them from their slaves, who they believed (as was common throughout the South) once freed from slave discipline would embark on an orgy of vengeance.

The Confederate flight from Port Royal left about 10,000 slaves in Union hands. They became contraband-of-war, presumably subject to the Confiscation Act but not formally free either. But effectively from November 7, 1861 forward the black population of Port Royal, South Carolina were no longer were slaves. For a time they would become wards of the federal government and its representatives in what became known as the “Port Royal Experiment,” as they contended with well-meaning Northerners over what their freedom would mean in practice, setting precedents that would help chart the course for Reconstruction after the Civil War.

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About Donald R. Shaffer

Donald R. Shaffer is the author of _After the Glory: The Struggles of Black Civil War Veterans_ (Kansas, 2004), which won the Peter Seaborg Award for Civil War Scholarship in 2005. More recently he published (with Elizabeth Regosin), _Voices of Emancipation: Understanding Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction through the U.S. Pension Bureau Files_ (2008). Dr. Shaffer teaches online exclusively (i.e., a virtual professor). He lives in Arizona and can be contacted at donald_shaffer@yahoo.com